Who we are and what we do is all tangled up in our identity. This subject considers how identities are constructed and maintained through mediated processes of self and other. The subject investigates the myriad demands and devices that figure in constructing our senses of self and other (including language, leisure, beliefs and embodied practices). By exploring identity in diverse contexts, across time and place, the subject maps varying conceptions of self and other and how these conceptions are constructed and maintained. A key focus is on how these mediated conceptions of self and other are translated into material practices of inclusion, exclusion, discrimination, violence and criminalisation.

Language plays a central role in the central disciplinary areas in the humanities and social sciences. This subject gives students tools for thinking about language in a range of disciplines, including linguistics, history, sociology, politics, literary studies, anthropology, language studies, psychology and psychoanalytic theory. It shows how language can be analysed as a system, but also how language features centrally in politcal and social contexts: for example, in the processing of the claims of asylum seekers, in developing views of ethnicity, race and nation, and in colonialism; and in the construction of gendered and sexual identity. The role of language in the psyche, and the process of acquisition of languages in children and in adults, are also important topics. Knowing how to think about language, and familiarity with the main thinkers who have discussed language in a range of humanities and social science disciplines, provide an indispensable basis for study in any area of the Arts degree.

The idea of power is a way to grasp the character of social relations. Investigating power can tell us about who is in control and who may benefit from such arrangements. Power can be a zero-sum game of domination. It can also be about people acting together to enact freedom. This subject examines the diverse and subtle ways power may be exercised. It considers how power operates in different domains such as markets, political systems and other social contexts. It also examines how power may be moderated by such things as regulation and human rights. A key aim is to explore how differing perspectives portray power relations and how issues of power distribution may be characterised and addressed.

Reason, many believe, is what makes us human. Until recently, most scientists and philosophers agreed that the ability to use the mind to analyse and interpret the world is something intrinsic to the nature of our species. Reason has a long and extraordinary history. We will explore a number of inter-related themes: the nature of reason from Ancient Greece to our contemporary world; the ever shifting relationship between reason and faith; reason's place in the development of scientific experimentation and thinking; shifting perspectives about the uses of Reason and, finally, how reason relates to theories of the mind, exploring the tensions between reason, the passions and the will.

Reason will take you on a journey from Plato's cave to the neuro-scientists' lab. We will visit revolutions in science, thinking and politics. We will explore the impact of some of the great philosophers of history, including Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Bentham, Coleridge, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault and many more besides. By the end of this subject you will have a deep understanding of the importance of the idea of reason to human history and philosophy. You might, even, be able to answer the question: 'does reason exist?'

Reason is an Arts Foundation Subject and we will argue that understanding the history and philosophy of reason provides great insights into many aspects of the humanities from political philosophy to understanding history. We will, of course, be paying particular attention to the foundational skills that will help you successfully complete your Arts major: particularly critical thinking and argument development.

This subject will provide students with an introduction to the complexity, challenges and richness of Australian Indigenous life and cultures. Drawing on a wide range of diverse and dynamic guest lecturers, this subject gives students an opportunity to encounter Australian Indigenous knowledges, histories and experiences through interdisciplinary perspectives. Across three thematic blocks - Indigenous Knowledges, Social and Political Contexts and Representation/Self-Representation - this subject engages contemporary cultural and intellectual debate. Social and political contexts will be considered through engagement with specific issues and a focus on Indigenous cultural forms, which may include literature, music, fine arts, museum exhibitions and performance, will allow students to consider self-representation as a means by which to disrupt and expand perceptions of Aboriginality.

Humans grapple with representations of themselves and their contexts. They also like to imagine other possible worlds. We use words, language, images, sounds and movement to construct narratives and stories, large and small, about the trivial and the profound, the past and the future. These representations can help us to understand worlds but they can also create worlds for us. This subject explores how different genres such as speech, writing, translation, film, theatre and art generate representations of social life, imagination and the human condition. A key aim of the subject is to develop a critical appreciation of how language, images and embodied gestures are used to construct empowering and disempowering discourses.

The world is gendered - but what is gender? We know gender is fundamental to the way in which we see ourselves and others, and how our communities and institutions are organised, but why? Why do gender norms and stereotypes emerge? What effects do they have on our lives? Drawing on feminist and queer theory, transgender studies, masculinity studies, and a range of disciplines across humanities and social sciences, this subject introduces students to the major concepts in gender studies, including: biological determinism, cultural essentialism, social constructionism, power and inequalities, sexuality, and queering categories of difference. Using a variety of case studies from social media, politics, sport, fashion, film, and music, the course will analyse how sex, gender, age, ethnicity, race, class, politics and social movements intersect to influence our understanding of sex, gender, and culture.

How do sex and gender operate in the world today, and what are their possible futures? Indeed, do these concepts have a future? Can they adequately capture the breadth, range and fluidity of contemporary and global sexed and gendered lives? Key themes explored in this subject include: current theories and experiences of sex and gender in the world today; the increasing instability of the concepts of sex and gender and their transformations; gender fluidity; the persistence of gender inequality; gender as a cultural category versus gender as lived bodily experience; and the uses and abuses of the gender concept. The subject culminates by considering imagined futures of everyday gender practices and of sexualities. These themes will be explored in a global and cross-cultural context.

How are genders and desires imagined, performed, reproduced and contested in the diversity of societies and cultures of the Asian region? How does mobility and sociocultural change influence, or impact on everyday notions of gender within Asia, and in discourses about Asia? What is the influence of histories, religions, languages and media on gender and sexualities in the Asian region and Asian diasporas? This subject critically engages with gender and desire in relation to the Asian region by drawing on contemporary gender theories and a diversity of perspectives from the humanities and social sciences. Topics will cover the Asian region and diasporas, with a focus on languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese.

This subject offers a specifically anthropological perspective to understandings of gender and sexuality, providing an empirical, cross-cultural framework with which to evaluate and examine various theoretical perspectives. Topics covered include the influence of an anthropologist's gendered and sexual identity in shaping ethnography, the meaning of heterosexuality in a cross-cultural context, gender and Islam, gender and kinship, gendered experiences of migration, male and female sex tourism, and experiences of masculinity, femininity and third gender categories and identities in the world today. On completion of the subject students should have gained knowledge of gender-based systems of social classification in a global context and through this develop a critical awareness of the representation of women's and men's lives in ethnography.

Bodies, genders and sexualities are at the heart of many contemporary social, cultural and political debates. Bodies in the plural are the focus of this subject - fat bodies and perfect bodies and trans bodies and leaky bodies, for example - and are analysed through a discussion of contemporary social research and an exploration of visual depictions (including advertising, film, music videos, photography). This subject examines the nature of debates around bodies, genders and sexualities, questioning the how, why and the politics underpinning them.

This subject maps the intertwined (and sometimes antagonistic) trajectories of Romanticism and early Feminism, as they emerge in Britain in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. Drawing on prose, poetry and drama from this period (including texts by Byron, Blake, Bronte, Hays, Radcliffe, Robinson, Mary Shelley, P. B. Shelley and Wordsworth), it studies the construction of modern notions of literature, culture, sexuality, emancipation and revolution. In so doing, the subject brings into dialogue late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophies of imagination and reason, accounts of the artist as Satan/Prometheus and Sappho, and myths of the lover as Don Juan and femme fatale. Students completing this subject should have a firm understanding of the literary, philosophical and cultural foundations of Romanticism and early Feminism, movements that have played key roles in the construction of the modern world.

This subject introduces ideas developed in feminist theory about the social and political construction of areas of experience relating to the body, gender and sexuality. Issues analysed in the subject include reproduction, eating disorders, pornography, sex work, sexual violence, sexual orientation and transgenderism. Students who complete this subject should be able to understand the ways in which issues connected with the body and sexuality are socially and politically constructed, understand the ways in which the construction of masculinity and femininity affects the learning and regulation of such areas of experience, and apply a variety of feminist approaches to the analysis of these issues.

What do pictures want in relation to sex and sexuality? How is art gendered? How do painters use the materiality of oil on canvas to make gendered critiques of the history of art and its cultures? Structured around the rich collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), each class will focus upon a specific work considering what insights a gendered analysis of it can provide. Lectures will be delivered in front of the paintings in situ in the gallery. Curatorial and expert academic staff from the NGV and the University of Melbourne will provide the lectures which will address a range of works drawn from the 18th century to the present. We will consider how gender, sex and sexuality impact on both the production and the reception of art and how artists utilise sexual codes at specific historical moments. Themes surrounding discourse, equality, ideology, and protest, will be addressed. We will consider how curatorial practises reinforce sexual difference through considering the artworks currently on display and how these produce meaning when they are taken as an aggregate in the context of an exhibition. We will study how works are conceptually framed by the information that the gallery provides about them through audio-guides, catalogue entries, hanging, and labelling. The subject will introduce you to key ideas from a number of thinkers including Judith Butler, Barbara Creed, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigiary, Michele Foucault, W.J.T.Mitchell, Nicholas Chare, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Baxandall, Lynda Nead, Fred Orton, Griselda Pollock, Carol Duncan and Lisa Tickner.

This subject introduces a wide range of anthropological interests in the human body from a comparative ethnographic perspective. It explores topics such as body image and eating disorders, trans/gendered bodies, sporting/dancing bodies, body modifications, consciousness and the body/mind continuum, commodified bodies, disabled bodies and body healing. We will investigate how the human body is individually and culturally constructed and socially experienced through a critical examination of a range of ethnographic and theoretical literature, as well as through the student's own bodily experiences and their exploratory field research.

This subject offers an in depth look at questions of gender, sex and sexuality exploring recent histories of feminist, queer, affect and transgender theory. This course considers how notions of power have changed in relation to understanding gender and sexuality, from structural understandings of inequality, to postmodern theorisations that see power as diffuse. This course offers a contextual understanding of theoretical shifts that have taken place, such as from the first wave of feminism to the second, from sexuality studies to queer theory, and other recent shifts in thinking about bodies, materiality and affects. Key themes include: inequality, femininities, masculinities, difference, intersectionality, materiality, affect and lived experience.

The science of sex and gender has always been contested and controversial. And, running through the empirical debates, are two competing concerns. One is that science continues its ugly tradition of embedding cultural biases and stereotypes of females and sexual and gender minorities into its theories, hypotheses, methods and interpretations. But an opposing concern is that the progressive politics of some scientists, academics and activists are undermining the integrity of science, by rejecting particular findings, theories or scientists because they find them politically unpalatable, rather than on intellectual grounds.

This subject explores contemporary debates – such as whether there are ‘male brains’ and ‘female brains’, and the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sport – through the lens of history and philosophy of science, tackling issues such as:
• How cultural assumptions about sex and gender influence scientific questions, methods, analysis and interpretation
• Appropriate and inappropriate roles for political values in science
• The nature of scientific objectivity
• Tensions between academic freedom and diversity and inclusion

What is the relationship between gender and culture in everyday life? Why are some forms of gender more culturally privileged than others? How do gender norms take shape and gain dominance in contemporary culture? This subject explores key sites through which gender identities emerge, become dominant, and/or transform. Through these cultural sites this subject examines hegemonic ideologies around gender, the uneven value placed on certain gendered subject positions, and possibilities for resistance in relation to femininities, masculinities, and other gender formations. Sites include areas of concern to feminist cultural studies including digital culture, popular media, youth cultures, celebrity and fandom, sport, fitness and self-discipline regimes, beauty culture and more. Core to this exploration are issues of location, race, whiteness, and nation, which inform hegemonic ideals and lived experiences of gendered life. Beyond simply understanding how identities are transforming in a highly mediated and globalised context, this subject seeks to critically engage with questions of injustice and inequality in relation to gendered cultures.

This subject explores diverse scenes, sites and spaces of gender as they occur in contemporary life and culture. It will draw on key theories and approaches to gender to study sexual difference and sexuality in relation to real world contexts including culture, home, education, media, politics, public and private institutions, and the law. The subject will provide Gender Studies students with the opportunity to reflect on, expand and synthesize the rich skills base from the Humanities and Social Sciences which they have cultivated during their studies. Additionally it offers an essential forum for discussion about how these skills can productively be applied in the professional workplace. This includes a consideration of how having a background in Gender Studies will enable potential future leaders in the workplace to challenge and counter discrimination and prejudice, to institute cultures of change and to champion Human Rights. The subject will feature regular guest lectures by arts, community, industry, and public sector leaders.

How do we come to experience ourselves as having a gender and a sexual orientation? How do social constructions of gender relate to understandings of sexuality? How have categories like masculinity and femininity; heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality transformed over time? This subject approaches gender and sexuality as historically and culturally contingent rather than as natural expressions of a private self. It provides the historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding the rise of specific genders and sexualities in relation to available medical, psychoanalytic, philosophical, political and popular discourses. Drawing from recent formations in both feminism and queer studies, this subject engages with a diverse range of cultural texts from the proceedings of court cases to personal advertisements, from celebrity gossip columns to popular film. On completion of this subject students should be able to explicate the complex imbrications of gender and sexuality and to analyse the representation of gendered and sexual identities and desires in selected cultural texts, which may include television, film, Internet and print media.

This subject will look at issues of gender and sexuality in an international context. It will cover war and militarism and their effect on women, the international division of labour, the effects of religious fundamentalisms, the politics of population and reproductive technologies, international trafficking in women, sexual violence and harmful cultural practices. Students who complete this subject should understand the ways in which gender politics might affect the study of international relations, understand how government policy and other forces operating in Australia and other Western countries are affecting the lives and opportunities of women and relationships between men and women in the rest of the world, be familiar with developments in feminist theory on the issues of human rights, cultural relativism, and have an understanding of international gender politics which can enrich their study of other subjects in the social sciences.

How have sexual practices and identities evolved, been represented and expressed from prehistory to the present? Where do our modern ideas about sexual orientation, gender and morality come from? In this subject we look at beliefs and practices around sexuality from prehistoric and ancient Greece, through the middle ages and early modern period, right up to the end of the twentieth century. We study the origins of the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to work out why their sacred texts present sex and gender in the way they do. We look at the intersection of race and sexuality in the colonial and postcolonial world, and study the influence of Freud and psychoanalysis on ideas of sexuality. Key moments like the sexual revolution and the AIDS crisis allow us to examine the history of political activism around sexuality. We take categories of classification and identity including transgender, cisgender, heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality, and apply them to historical case studies. By charting a historical genealogy of sexual practices and ideas about sexual practices, the subject will show how the gendered body and sex have been simultaneously linked to social liberation and control. On completion of this subject, you should understand the ways in which sexualities have multiple histories and how they remain highly contested in the majority of cultures. The final assessment allows you to choose your own research question (with help from your teacher) on any topic that you’ve found intriguing on the subject.

Kinship studies has a long, important and contentious history in Anthropology. Drawing on this historical legacy this subject applies both classic and contemporary anthropological theories of family, kinship and social relatedness to a range of ethnographic case studies. The subject addresses three inter-related themes. Firstly, there is an anthropological focus on the links that exist between kinship and the nation-state in terms of national identity, ethnicity, migration and state policy. Secondly, the subject considers yet complicates imaginings of blood ties and biogenetic substance by examining the influences of black magic, ghost marriages, Skype, spiritual conception, milk, guns, deities, surrogate mothers and medical practitioners in the shaping of kin ties today. Finally, there is a focus on continuity and social change and the ways in which the meaning of family, kinship and social relationships are transformed or otherwise by new reproductive and genetic technologies, polygamy, same-sex relationships, friendships and the influence of internet and mobile-phone based forms of communication.

This subject explores race and gender and their interconnection. Is race a biological category, a socially constructed category, or a pernicious fiction? Currently humans are divided into hierarchies along race and gender lines, but what would a just future look like: one in which race and gender have become history, or one in which your race or gender no longer marks you out for unequal treatment? Historically and currently, all settler-colonial countries racialize their First Nation peoples. Anti-racist movements, such as Black Lives Matter, aim to undo this structural racism, but would doing that be enough to fully address the justice claims of First Nation peoples?

As well as exploring these fundamental questions about the social categories of race and gender, the subject also uses tools from philosophy of language and epistemology to explore application areas, including when if ever it is morally permissible to vandalize monuments, whether pornography subordinates and silences women, what hate speech is and what our response to it should be, and what white ignorance is and how to combat it.

This subject offers a close study of the phenomenon of film noir from its precursors in silent cinema, through classical and B film noir, to digital cinema. Film Noir: History and Sexuality will invite students to consider the way in which cultural, political and technological factors influence the aesthetics, narrative form and style of film noir. A key focus of this subject will be the changing representations of gender and sexuality and the challenges posed to regimes of censorship in cinema. Movements studied will include the silent film; German expressionism; classical Hollywood noir; noir revised by New Wave directors (particularly in France and Hong Kong), postmodern noir, post-noir and digital noir in the broader media ecology. Students should complete the subject with an understanding of various approaches to film historiography (including an exploration of archival histories, media archaeologies, intersections of memory and history as well as digital histories), a comprehensive synthesis of noir and its variants and an opportunity to connect theory and practice using digital tools.

Issues related to gender and sexuality are key to understand social and cultural practices in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. In this subject such issues are explored in relation to their representation in cultural texts – including fiction literature, film and TV. Major themes to be explored include gender violence, gay marriage legislation, gender reassignment legislation, post-colonial feminisms, new masculinities, and sexism in language.

This subject introduces students to the ways in which language indexes and constructs identities in social contexts. It introduces students to a range of theoretical approaches, and the distinctive research methodologies associated with each. These include language socialization. studies of language in social interaction using the techniques of Conversation Analysis and discourse analysis (including critical discourse analysis). and poststructuralist approaches to language and subjectivity. Topics covered will include gender-related language use, language and racism, language and sexuality, the negotiation and deployment of identities in face-to-face interaction, and the way language and discourse construct and maintain a sense of "otherness". On completion of the subject, students should be able to recognise ways in which language and discourse construct particular social identities of relevance to themselves, and critically analyse ways of thinking about the complex phenomenon of language and identity.

This subject will examine the following questions: what exactly do we mean by gender diversity, who do current ideas include or exclude, why and when is it important, and how should we try to achieve it?

The what, why and how of gender diversity are fundamental questions relating to organizational management, performance and productivity, social values, fairness and justice, as well as the ethical and legal obligations of organisations. This subject explores these issues from ethical, empirical, historical and practical perspectives. It takes an interdisciplinary approach that draws on management science, philosophy, psychology and leadership studies , and provides opportunities for students to apply contemporary academic understandings to their current and future work roles.

In a learning environment that actively draws on the diverse perspectives of students from across faculties, the subject will explore topics such as:

• The legal and social history of rights and representation in the workplace
• The business case for gender diversity
• The social justice case for gender diversity
• The ethics of affirmative action
• Practical scripts and strategies for motivating and leading change in the workplace

How is trauma felt, remembered, and narrated? What are the dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, class, and citizenship in relation to cultural politics of memory and trauma. What are the corporeal manifestations of trauma and memory? Whose memories are valued, believed and commemorated and whose memories have been repressed? What challenges do traumatic events present for those who want to represent and heal them? This subject approaches concepts of trauma and memory as historically and culturally contingent, asking what counts as trauma, for whom and under what circumstances. The subject will open by tracing history of the concept of trauma in psychoanalysis and medicine, followed by critical perspectives from feminist, queer, transgender, critical race, and body studies perspectives. In the second part of the subject we will look at different sites, forms and representations of trauma in literature, films, art, oral narratives, memoirs, photographs, and social movements.

How have gendered ideas shaped key events in world history? And how have gendered subjects of history experienced these events? This subject will focus on how gender has shaped world history alongside considering the gendered impact of cataclysmic events on everyday people and their communities.

Through a transnational study of major events in the world this subject will explore how gender has been vital in shaping geopolitics, economics, culture and society. Together with this broad view, personal and individual and everyday perspectives will also be considered. By focusing on the everyday life of men and women who experienced these major world events, students will enhance their understanding of how gender is also vital to questions of identity, emotions and the self – both in the past and in contemporary times.

The subject will cover key events with global impacts in a chronological order from 1800 beginning with Empire and imperialism. Following this, World War I, diplomacy and international peace activities in the interwar period, World War II, movements of decolonisation as well as social movements that came to the fore after World War II will be examined as will the ongoing legacies of all of these events in the world today. Each of these world events and structures will be examined for the ways in which gender was constructed and operated thought them. In addition to this the gendered impacts of these events and structures on people will be a point of focus – this will include public figures alongside people without high profiles but whose lives we can learn about from the archival traces that remain.

Classes will be in a 2-hour seminar format and will have an interactive focus but will include some short lectures and presentations. Seminar sessions involve an examination of primary sources each week such as letters and correspondence, photographs and images as well as official documents and media reports. These primary sources will be read and discussed alongside the work of historians so that students will also have a good understanding of historiographical traditions of gender and feminist history.

In the era of globalisation, contemporary cultures are increasingly shaped by transnational movements: of humans, commodities, and media, among other things. Global Cultures leads students to explore the human, subjective and cultural dimensions of these intensified transnational mobilities with a focus on the Asian region. Central concepts include mobilities, migration, cultural hybridity, translocality, precarity, and superdiversity. The subject introduces students to these concepts by drawing on theorizations from cultural studies and other disciplines in the humanities and, to some extent, social sciences, using contemporary, mainly Asia-based case studies to ground the conceptual material. The subject explores how lived experiences of mobility intersect with the power dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, and class, and engages with critical cultural theory to work toward not simply an understanding of globalisation as a series of social processes, but more importantly a cultural critique of globalisation. It introduces students to representations of mobility and globalisation across a range of popular media that may include film, television, Internet cultures and others, and explores how experiences of mobility––through migration, international education, tourism, mediated imagination and other modes––shape subjectivity.

Who we are and what we do is all tangled up in our identity. This subject considers how identities are constructed and maintained through mediated processes of self and other. The subject investigates the myriad demands and devices that figure in constructing our senses of self and other (including language, leisure, beliefs and embodied practices). By exploring identity in diverse contexts, across time and place, the subject maps varying conceptions of self and other and how these conceptions are constructed and maintained. A key focus is on how these mediated conceptions of self and other are translated into material practices of inclusion, exclusion, discrimination, violence and criminalisation.

Language plays a central role in the central disciplinary areas in the humanities and social sciences. This subject gives students tools for thinking about language in a range of disciplines, including linguistics, history, sociology, politics, literary studies, anthropology, language studies, psychology and psychoanalytic theory. It shows how language can be analysed as a system, but also how language features centrally in politcal and social contexts: for example, in the processing of the claims of asylum seekers, in developing views of ethnicity, race and nation, and in colonialism; and in the construction of gendered and sexual identity. The role of language in the psyche, and the process of acquisition of languages in children and in adults, are also important topics. Knowing how to think about language, and familiarity with the main thinkers who have discussed language in a range of humanities and social science disciplines, provide an indispensable basis for study in any area of the Arts degree.

The idea of power is a way to grasp the character of social relations. Investigating power can tell us about who is in control and who may benefit from such arrangements. Power can be a zero-sum game of domination. It can also be about people acting together to enact freedom. This subject examines the diverse and subtle ways power may be exercised. It considers how power operates in different domains such as markets, political systems and other social contexts. It also examines how power may be moderated by such things as regulation and human rights. A key aim is to explore how differing perspectives portray power relations and how issues of power distribution may be characterised and addressed.

Reason, many believe, is what makes us human. Until recently, most scientists and philosophers agreed that the ability to use the mind to analyse and interpret the world is something intrinsic to the nature of our species. Reason has a long and extraordinary history. We will explore a number of inter-related themes: the nature of reason from Ancient Greece to our contemporary world; the ever shifting relationship between reason and faith; reason's place in the development of scientific experimentation and thinking; shifting perspectives about the uses of Reason and, finally, how reason relates to theories of the mind, exploring the tensions between reason, the passions and the will.

Reason will take you on a journey from Plato's cave to the neuro-scientists' lab. We will visit revolutions in science, thinking and politics. We will explore the impact of some of the great philosophers of history, including Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Bentham, Coleridge, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault and many more besides. By the end of this subject you will have a deep understanding of the importance of the idea of reason to human history and philosophy. You might, even, be able to answer the question: 'does reason exist?'

Reason is an Arts Foundation Subject and we will argue that understanding the history and philosophy of reason provides great insights into many aspects of the humanities from political philosophy to understanding history. We will, of course, be paying particular attention to the foundational skills that will help you successfully complete your Arts major: particularly critical thinking and argument development.

This subject will provide students with an introduction to the complexity, challenges and richness of Australian Indigenous life and cultures. Drawing on a wide range of diverse and dynamic guest lecturers, this subject gives students an opportunity to encounter Australian Indigenous knowledges, histories and experiences through interdisciplinary perspectives. Across three thematic blocks - Indigenous Knowledges, Social and Political Contexts and Representation/Self-Representation - this subject engages contemporary cultural and intellectual debate. Social and political contexts will be considered through engagement with specific issues and a focus on Indigenous cultural forms, which may include literature, music, fine arts, museum exhibitions and performance, will allow students to consider self-representation as a means by which to disrupt and expand perceptions of Aboriginality.

Humans grapple with representations of themselves and their contexts. They also like to imagine other possible worlds. We use words, language, images, sounds and movement to construct narratives and stories, large and small, about the trivial and the profound, the past and the future. These representations can help us to understand worlds but they can also create worlds for us. This subject explores how different genres such as speech, writing, translation, film, theatre and art generate representations of social life, imagination and the human condition. A key aim of the subject is to develop a critical appreciation of how language, images and embodied gestures are used to construct empowering and disempowering discourses.

The world is gendered - but what is gender? We know gender is fundamental to the way in which we see ourselves and others, and how our communities and institutions are organised, but why? Why do gender norms and stereotypes emerge? What effects do they have on our lives? Drawing on feminist and queer theory, transgender studies, masculinity studies, and a range of disciplines across humanities and social sciences, this subject introduces students to the major concepts in gender studies, including: biological determinism, cultural essentialism, social constructionism, power and inequalities, sexuality, and queering categories of difference. Using a variety of case studies from social media, politics, sport, fashion, film, and music, the course will analyse how sex, gender, age, ethnicity, race, class, politics and social movements intersect to influence our understanding of sex, gender, and culture.

How do sex and gender operate in the world today, and what are their possible futures? Indeed, do these concepts have a future? Can they adequately capture the breadth, range and fluidity of contemporary and global sexed and gendered lives? Key themes explored in this subject include: current theories and experiences of sex and gender in the world today; the increasing instability of the concepts of sex and gender and their transformations; gender fluidity; the persistence of gender inequality; gender as a cultural category versus gender as lived bodily experience; and the uses and abuses of the gender concept. The subject culminates by considering imagined futures of everyday gender practices and of sexualities. These themes will be explored in a global and cross-cultural context.

How are genders and desires imagined, performed, reproduced and contested in the diversity of societies and cultures of the Asian region? How does mobility and sociocultural change influence, or impact on everyday notions of gender within Asia, and in discourses about Asia? What is the influence of histories, religions, languages and media on gender and sexualities in the Asian region and Asian diasporas? This subject critically engages with gender and desire in relation to the Asian region by drawing on contemporary gender theories and a diversity of perspectives from the humanities and social sciences. Topics will cover the Asian region and diasporas, with a focus on languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese.

This subject offers a specifically anthropological perspective to understandings of gender and sexuality, providing an empirical, cross-cultural framework with which to evaluate and examine various theoretical perspectives. Topics covered include the influence of an anthropologist's gendered and sexual identity in shaping ethnography, the meaning of heterosexuality in a cross-cultural context, gender and Islam, gender and kinship, gendered experiences of migration, male and female sex tourism, and experiences of masculinity, femininity and third gender categories and identities in the world today. On completion of the subject students should have gained knowledge of gender-based systems of social classification in a global context and through this develop a critical awareness of the representation of women's and men's lives in ethnography.

Bodies, genders and sexualities are at the heart of many contemporary social, cultural and political debates. Bodies in the plural are the focus of this subject - fat bodies and perfect bodies and trans bodies and leaky bodies, for example - and are analysed through a discussion of contemporary social research and an exploration of visual depictions (including advertising, film, music videos, photography). This subject examines the nature of debates around bodies, genders and sexualities, questioning the how, why and the politics underpinning them.

This subject maps the intertwined (and sometimes antagonistic) trajectories of Romanticism and early Feminism, as they emerge in Britain in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. Drawing on prose, poetry and drama from this period (including texts by Byron, Blake, Bronte, Hays, Radcliffe, Robinson, Mary Shelley, P. B. Shelley and Wordsworth), it studies the construction of modern notions of literature, culture, sexuality, emancipation and revolution. In so doing, the subject brings into dialogue late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophies of imagination and reason, accounts of the artist as Satan/Prometheus and Sappho, and myths of the lover as Don Juan and femme fatale. Students completing this subject should have a firm understanding of the literary, philosophical and cultural foundations of Romanticism and early Feminism, movements that have played key roles in the construction of the modern world.

This subject introduces ideas developed in feminist theory about the social and political construction of areas of experience relating to the body, gender and sexuality. Issues analysed in the subject include reproduction, eating disorders, pornography, sex work, sexual violence, sexual orientation and transgenderism. Students who complete this subject should be able to understand the ways in which issues connected with the body and sexuality are socially and politically constructed, understand the ways in which the construction of masculinity and femininity affects the learning and regulation of such areas of experience, and apply a variety of feminist approaches to the analysis of these issues.

This subject offers an in depth look at questions of gender, sex and sexuality exploring recent histories of feminist, queer, affect and transgender theory. This course considers how notions of power have changed in relation to understanding gender and sexuality, from structural understandings of inequality, to postmodern theorisations that see power as diffuse. This course offers a contextual understanding of theoretical shifts that have taken place, such as from the first wave of feminism to the second, from sexuality studies to queer theory, and other recent shifts in thinking about bodies, materiality and affects. Key themes include: inequality, femininities, masculinities, difference, intersectionality, materiality, affect and lived experience.

What do pictures want in relation to sex and sexuality? How is art gendered? How do painters use the materiality of oil on canvas to make gendered critiques of the history of art and its cultures? Structured around the rich collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), each class will focus upon a specific work considering what insights a gendered analysis of it can provide. Lectures will be delivered in front of the paintings in situ in the gallery. Curatorial and expert academic staff from the NGV and the University of Melbourne will provide the lectures which will address a range of works drawn from the 18th century to the present. We will consider how gender, sex and sexuality impact on both the production and the reception of art and how artists utilise sexual codes at specific historical moments. Themes surrounding discourse, equality, ideology, and protest, will be addressed. We will consider how curatorial practises reinforce sexual difference through considering the artworks currently on display and how these produce meaning when they are taken as an aggregate in the context of an exhibition. We will study how works are conceptually framed by the information that the gallery provides about them through audio-guides, catalogue entries, hanging, and labelling. The subject will introduce you to key ideas from a number of thinkers including Judith Butler, Barbara Creed, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigiary, Michele Foucault, W.J.T.Mitchell, Nicholas Chare, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Baxandall, Lynda Nead, Fred Orton, Griselda Pollock, Carol Duncan and Lisa Tickner.

This subject introduces a wide range of anthropological interests in the human body from a comparative ethnographic perspective. It explores topics such as body image and eating disorders, trans/gendered bodies, sporting/dancing bodies, body modifications, consciousness and the body/mind continuum, commodified bodies, disabled bodies and body healing. We will investigate how the human body is individually and culturally constructed and socially experienced through a critical examination of a range of ethnographic and theoretical literature, as well as through the student's own bodily experiences and their exploratory field research.

The science of sex and gender has always been contested and controversial. And, running through the empirical debates, are two competing concerns. One is that science continues its ugly tradition of embedding cultural biases and stereotypes of females and sexual and gender minorities into its theories, hypotheses, methods and interpretations. But an opposing concern is that the progressive politics of some scientists, academics and activists are undermining the integrity of science, by rejecting particular findings, theories or scientists because they find them politically unpalatable, rather than on intellectual grounds.

This subject explores contemporary debates – such as whether there are ‘male brains’ and ‘female brains’, and the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sport – through the lens of history and philosophy of science, tackling issues such as:
• How cultural assumptions about sex and gender influence scientific questions, methods, analysis and interpretation
• Appropriate and inappropriate roles for political values in science
• The nature of scientific objectivity
• Tensions between academic freedom and diversity and inclusion

What is the relationship between gender and culture in everyday life? Why are some forms of gender more culturally privileged than others? How do gender norms take shape and gain dominance in contemporary culture? This subject explores key sites through which gender identities emerge, become dominant, and/or transform. Through these cultural sites this subject examines hegemonic ideologies around gender, the uneven value placed on certain gendered subject positions, and possibilities for resistance in relation to femininities, masculinities, and other gender formations. Sites include areas of concern to feminist cultural studies including digital culture, popular media, youth cultures, celebrity and fandom, sport, fitness and self-discipline regimes, beauty culture and more. Core to this exploration are issues of location, race, whiteness, and nation, which inform hegemonic ideals and lived experiences of gendered life. Beyond simply understanding how identities are transforming in a highly mediated and globalised context, this subject seeks to critically engage with questions of injustice and inequality in relation to gendered cultures.

How do we come to experience ourselves as having a gender and a sexual orientation? How do social constructions of gender relate to understandings of sexuality? How have categories like masculinity and femininity; heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality transformed over time? This subject approaches gender and sexuality as historically and culturally contingent rather than as natural expressions of a private self. It provides the historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding the rise of specific genders and sexualities in relation to available medical, psychoanalytic, philosophical, political and popular discourses. Drawing from recent formations in both feminism and queer studies, this subject engages with a diverse range of cultural texts from the proceedings of court cases to personal advertisements, from celebrity gossip columns to popular film. On completion of this subject students should be able to explicate the complex imbrications of gender and sexuality and to analyse the representation of gendered and sexual identities and desires in selected cultural texts, which may include television, film, Internet and print media.

This subject will look at issues of gender and sexuality in an international context. It will cover war and militarism and their effect on women, the international division of labour, the effects of religious fundamentalisms, the politics of population and reproductive technologies, international trafficking in women, sexual violence and harmful cultural practices. Students who complete this subject should understand the ways in which gender politics might affect the study of international relations, understand how government policy and other forces operating in Australia and other Western countries are affecting the lives and opportunities of women and relationships between men and women in the rest of the world, be familiar with developments in feminist theory on the issues of human rights, cultural relativism, and have an understanding of international gender politics which can enrich their study of other subjects in the social sciences.

How have sexual practices and identities evolved, been represented and expressed from prehistory to the present? Where do our modern ideas about sexual orientation, gender and morality come from? In this subject we look at beliefs and practices around sexuality from prehistoric and ancient Greece, through the middle ages and early modern period, right up to the end of the twentieth century. We study the origins of the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to work out why their sacred texts present sex and gender in the way they do. We look at the intersection of race and sexuality in the colonial and postcolonial world, and study the influence of Freud and psychoanalysis on ideas of sexuality. Key moments like the sexual revolution and the AIDS crisis allow us to examine the history of political activism around sexuality. We take categories of classification and identity including transgender, cisgender, heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality, and apply them to historical case studies. By charting a historical genealogy of sexual practices and ideas about sexual practices, the subject will show how the gendered body and sex have been simultaneously linked to social liberation and control. On completion of this subject, you should understand the ways in which sexualities have multiple histories and how they remain highly contested in the majority of cultures. The final assessment allows you to choose your own research question (with help from your teacher) on any topic that you’ve found intriguing on the subject.

Kinship studies has a long, important and contentious history in Anthropology. Drawing on this historical legacy this subject applies both classic and contemporary anthropological theories of family, kinship and social relatedness to a range of ethnographic case studies. The subject addresses three inter-related themes. Firstly, there is an anthropological focus on the links that exist between kinship and the nation-state in terms of national identity, ethnicity, migration and state policy. Secondly, the subject considers yet complicates imaginings of blood ties and biogenetic substance by examining the influences of black magic, ghost marriages, Skype, spiritual conception, milk, guns, deities, surrogate mothers and medical practitioners in the shaping of kin ties today. Finally, there is a focus on continuity and social change and the ways in which the meaning of family, kinship and social relationships are transformed or otherwise by new reproductive and genetic technologies, polygamy, same-sex relationships, friendships and the influence of internet and mobile-phone based forms of communication.

This subject explores race and gender and their interconnection. Is race a biological category, a socially constructed category, or a pernicious fiction? Currently humans are divided into hierarchies along race and gender lines, but what would a just future look like: one in which race and gender have become history, or one in which your race or gender no longer marks you out for unequal treatment? Historically and currently, all settler-colonial countries racialize their First Nation peoples. Anti-racist movements, such as Black Lives Matter, aim to undo this structural racism, but would doing that be enough to fully address the justice claims of First Nation peoples?

As well as exploring these fundamental questions about the social categories of race and gender, the subject also uses tools from philosophy of language and epistemology to explore application areas, including when if ever it is morally permissible to vandalize monuments, whether pornography subordinates and silences women, what hate speech is and what our response to it should be, and what white ignorance is and how to combat it.

This subject offers a close study of the phenomenon of film noir from its precursors in silent cinema, through classical and B film noir, to digital cinema. Film Noir: History and Sexuality will invite students to consider the way in which cultural, political and technological factors influence the aesthetics, narrative form and style of film noir. A key focus of this subject will be the changing representations of gender and sexuality and the challenges posed to regimes of censorship in cinema. Movements studied will include the silent film; German expressionism; classical Hollywood noir; noir revised by New Wave directors (particularly in France and Hong Kong), postmodern noir, post-noir and digital noir in the broader media ecology. Students should complete the subject with an understanding of various approaches to film historiography (including an exploration of archival histories, media archaeologies, intersections of memory and history as well as digital histories), a comprehensive synthesis of noir and its variants and an opportunity to connect theory and practice using digital tools.

Issues related to gender and sexuality are key to understand social and cultural practices in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. In this subject such issues are explored in relation to their representation in cultural texts – including fiction literature, film and TV. Major themes to be explored include gender violence, gay marriage legislation, gender reassignment legislation, post-colonial feminisms, new masculinities, and sexism in language.

This subject introduces students to the ways in which language indexes and constructs identities in social contexts. It introduces students to a range of theoretical approaches, and the distinctive research methodologies associated with each. These include language socialization. studies of language in social interaction using the techniques of Conversation Analysis and discourse analysis (including critical discourse analysis). and poststructuralist approaches to language and subjectivity. Topics covered will include gender-related language use, language and racism, language and sexuality, the negotiation and deployment of identities in face-to-face interaction, and the way language and discourse construct and maintain a sense of "otherness". On completion of the subject, students should be able to recognise ways in which language and discourse construct particular social identities of relevance to themselves, and critically analyse ways of thinking about the complex phenomenon of language and identity.

This subject will examine the following questions: what exactly do we mean by gender diversity, who do current ideas include or exclude, why and when is it important, and how should we try to achieve it?

The what, why and how of gender diversity are fundamental questions relating to organizational management, performance and productivity, social values, fairness and justice, as well as the ethical and legal obligations of organisations. This subject explores these issues from ethical, empirical, historical and practical perspectives. It takes an interdisciplinary approach that draws on management science, philosophy, psychology and leadership studies , and provides opportunities for students to apply contemporary academic understandings to their current and future work roles.

In a learning environment that actively draws on the diverse perspectives of students from across faculties, the subject will explore topics such as:

• The legal and social history of rights and representation in the workplace
• The business case for gender diversity
• The social justice case for gender diversity
• The ethics of affirmative action
• Practical scripts and strategies for motivating and leading change in the workplace

How is trauma felt, remembered, and narrated? What are the dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, class, and citizenship in relation to cultural politics of memory and trauma. What are the corporeal manifestations of trauma and memory? Whose memories are valued, believed and commemorated and whose memories have been repressed? What challenges do traumatic events present for those who want to represent and heal them? This subject approaches concepts of trauma and memory as historically and culturally contingent, asking what counts as trauma, for whom and under what circumstances. The subject will open by tracing history of the concept of trauma in psychoanalysis and medicine, followed by critical perspectives from feminist, queer, transgender, critical race, and body studies perspectives. In the second part of the subject we will look at different sites, forms and representations of trauma in literature, films, art, oral narratives, memoirs, photographs, and social movements.

How have gendered ideas shaped key events in world history? And how have gendered subjects of history experienced these events? This subject will focus on how gender has shaped world history alongside considering the gendered impact of cataclysmic events on everyday people and their communities.

Through a transnational study of major events in the world this subject will explore how gender has been vital in shaping geopolitics, economics, culture and society. Together with this broad view, personal and individual and everyday perspectives will also be considered. By focusing on the everyday life of men and women who experienced these major world events, students will enhance their understanding of how gender is also vital to questions of identity, emotions and the self – both in the past and in contemporary times.

The subject will cover key events with global impacts in a chronological order from 1800 beginning with Empire and imperialism. Following this, World War I, diplomacy and international peace activities in the interwar period, World War II, movements of decolonisation as well as social movements that came to the fore after World War II will be examined as will the ongoing legacies of all of these events in the world today. Each of these world events and structures will be examined for the ways in which gender was constructed and operated thought them. In addition to this the gendered impacts of these events and structures on people will be a point of focus – this will include public figures alongside people without high profiles but whose lives we can learn about from the archival traces that remain.

Classes will be in a 2-hour seminar format and will have an interactive focus but will include some short lectures and presentations. Seminar sessions involve an examination of primary sources each week such as letters and correspondence, photographs and images as well as official documents and media reports. These primary sources will be read and discussed alongside the work of historians so that students will also have a good understanding of historiographical traditions of gender and feminist history.

In the era of globalisation, contemporary cultures are increasingly shaped by transnational movements: of humans, commodities, and media, among other things. Global Cultures leads students to explore the human, subjective and cultural dimensions of these intensified transnational mobilities with a focus on the Asian region. Central concepts include mobilities, migration, cultural hybridity, translocality, precarity, and superdiversity. The subject introduces students to these concepts by drawing on theorizations from cultural studies and other disciplines in the humanities and, to some extent, social sciences, using contemporary, mainly Asia-based case studies to ground the conceptual material. The subject explores how lived experiences of mobility intersect with the power dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, and class, and engages with critical cultural theory to work toward not simply an understanding of globalisation as a series of social processes, but more importantly a cultural critique of globalisation. It introduces students to representations of mobility and globalisation across a range of popular media that may include film, television, Internet cultures and others, and explores how experiences of mobility––through migration, international education, tourism, mediated imagination and other modes––shape subjectivity.